Pragmatics and Discourse
Dr. Carmen Maiz
Practice: Conversational implicature
In pairs or small groups, decide what maxims the speakers are flouting in the following
exchanges. What are the conversational implicatures?
(An adult woman at the door of a discotheque)
Doorman: I need to see your ID, it’s the rule.
Woman: But I left it back at the hotel.
Doorman: Sorry madam, then I can’t let you in.
Woman: But I’m twenty-nine and the mother of four!
Doorman: Yes, and I’m the pope’s grandfather and have six kids.
A: We’ll all miss Bill and Agatha, won’t we?
B: Well, we’ll all miss BILL.
Steven: Wilfred is meeting a woman for dinner tonight.
Susan: Does his wife know about it?
Steven: Of COURSE she does. The woman he is meeting IS his wife. (Leech 1983: 91)
Parent: Someone’s eaten the icing of the cake.
Child: It wasn’t ME.
Parent: I wasn’t asking you that.
A: Let’s go to the movies.
B: I’ll bring the Kleenex.
Parent: I thought you were doing your maths homework.
Child: I need to get my ruler.
Parent: Is it under the popcorn?
President Bush was recently asked about his wife’s age. This is what he replied to the journalists.
“I won’t tell you how old she is. I’ll only tell you that she was born the same year as me and that
I am 60.”
You did a great job, and I’m not being polite.
Friend A: Do you like my new hairstyle?
Friend B: Have you seen the film Holocaust?
The following extract is taken from a programme for Peter Pan, performed in the Royal Lyceum
Theatre (Edinburgh). This excerpt is part of the programme’s description of the cast and the
technical support: it describes Mike Travis, on percussion. It is addressed at children.
“Mike Travis spends his life hitting things of various shapes and sizes. When he is not hitting
things, he lives in the country with two dogs, two cats, two goats, twenty-one ducks, five geese,
two pigs and eight hens (but not all in the same house, the smell would be terrible!). He loves
playing for the Lyceum Christmas shows (Peter Pan is his twelfth) because he gets to make up
funny sounds for people like scratching, creeping, fighting, getting kicked on the bum and getting
their noses tweaked.
